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The World is Made of Paper is a modern fantasy, psychological whosawhatsit that also happens to be a visual novel.

Hurrah!

I don't really want to bore you too much with introductory ramblings, so I'm just going to get straight to the stuff people actually care about.

Story

Being a bored college dropout with nothing better to do, Dion Nagi had read a lot of books in the past few years. Far, far too many of them.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a healthy practice. At least not for a young man already prone to over analyzing things.

After a certain point, the lines between reality and fiction started to blur, and it became increasingly easy to interpret even the events of his own life as if they were written in a book. Everything from the people he knew, to the problems he suffered from, started to seem like nothing more than plot devices intent on bringing him to a meaningful conclusion.

Dion didn't really mind this, however. To him, that part was really nothing more than a new way of looking at the world. No, what really made him snap was, in fact, the most simple of book related thoughts.

"What is the genre of my life?"

It didn't take long for him to realize the answer: he was living in an underdog story. He was the kid left at the bottom rung with nowhere to go but up. It would be sappy, heartwarming, and incredibly cheesy.

He hated that kind of story.

So he did the only thing he could think to do. He left his home, his town, his job, his belongings, and just about everything even closely related to his life as it was. He did everything it took to throw away the novel he had already started.

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Stuck in an unknown town without gas, a place to stay, or any immediate goal to speak of, Dion found himself starting a new story. A story that he realized began with him being a complete and total idiot.

Hit with a car on the way to find a gas station, his story continued. A story that seemed to want nothing more than to kill him at every given moment.

A story that, upon him waking up in the hospital with a head injury, started to get a bit weird.

Over time, Dion's reality started to fall apart around him, and the more he attempted to take control his life, the stranger it seemed to get.

In his attempt to simply start a new life, he found himself looking at much, much more.

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When given the opportunity to change the world at it's very core, would he be willing to take it?

How would he do it?

What would he turn it into?

And what will he do when he realizes he's not the only one who can?

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The demo is just over 37,000 words in length, with three full demo endings, and one bad end. It should take somewhere around one and a half to two hours to complete one playthrough. Quite a bit of the game changes depending on your choices, so I encourage you to play through it again if you like it.

New additions to the revamped demo:

- One of the three demo endings is now extended.
- The game now has a custom menu. It's fully functioning, however, there are currently no hover or select displayables, meaning you can't really tell when you've selected certain options. The main place where this probably stands out is in the loading screen. Loading does work. Just click on the load button, and even though nothing will appear to change, selecting your saves will now load them. I'm really sorry about this complication. It will be fixed, no questions asked, in the full version. For now, blame the Ren'py documentation for being utterly worthless.
- Some new expressions for characters.
- Two new backgrounds.
- Some of the art is now cleaned up. The CGs are still rough, however.
- General bugfixes and edits applied.

Latest Blog

The revamped demo is going up just as I'm writing this. Hopefully it will be available for download soon.

The revamped demo does not add any chapters that weren't in the original demo. This is mostly because ending on Chapter 4 would be really boring. However, there are a few changes from the original demo version:

- One of the three demo endings is now extended.
- The game now has a custom menu. It's fully functioning, however, there are currently no hover or select displayables, meaning you can't really tell when you've selected certain options. The main place where this probably stands out is in the loading screen. Loading does work. Just click on the load button, and even though nothing will appear to change, selecting your saves will now load them. I'm really sorry about this complication. It will be fixed, no questions asked, in the full version. For now, blame the Ren'py documentation for being utterly worthless.
- Some new expressions for characters.
- Two new backgrounds.
- Some of the art is now cleaned up. The CGs are still rough, however.
- General bugfixes and edits applied.

If you run into any problems, please comment about it. Otherwise, have fun!

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Progress on full version:

The game contains 4,890 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 71,102 words,
for an average of 14.5 words per screen.
The game contains 75 menus.

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I chose to stay in the room, so I ended up meeting with Marriane again, and then going to the haunted house at Jacob's request.
Although, now you've got me curious as to what happens with the other choice...

This was quite interesting.
Very different from what I expected, it turned more into the supernatural than something about a paper metaphor. Changing your life is very interesting, but I find it odd that he sees no other way to make it happen.
Aside from the odd motivations of your main character, this is sensibly written with a cast of interesting albeit not 100% trustworthy characters .
The artwork I really enjoy.

It is a little bit disappointing that the save function does not seem to work right now (perhaps I just messed something up?), it would be nice to go back to certain parts and see how it turns out.